Tristan Manco is the author of Stencil Graffiti and Street Logos.
Caleb Neelon aka SONIK is an artist and writer from Boston, who has been traveling to and painting in Brazil since 1997.
Ignacio Aronovich and Louise Chin run "Lost Art" website and have for many years documented the streets of Brazil from their home city of São Paulo.

So here is new Tristan Manco/Thames & Hudson graffiti book about the hot (and not so known) brazillian graffiti scene.
The book looks like other Thames & Hudson book, no hard cover and minimal design (the layout is nearly the same in this book than in the 20 years old Subway art...)

There are over 300 pictures in this book. Some are small, but they are also many big double page pictures.

Most of the pictures were unknown to me. Even if of course we already know many of Brazilian street stars (Os Gemeos, Calma, Herbert, Alexandre Orion...)

The very good thing with this book are the texts.
Sonik is a good story teller and he shares with us some of his painting experiences in Brazil. There is of course also a text about famous Brazilian tags : Pichação.
A little history about Brazil graffiti (from Amazonian rock carvings to oppposition to Brazil's social problems & hip-hop graffiti).
Maybe a few artist interviews would also be welcome.

As a conclusion, i think this book present all brazillian graffiti school/styles. Most important artists have a couple of pages, most photos are new and texts are good.
The only thing i don't like much is the design/lay out of the book which is quite old-school compared to european graffiti/art books from Colors Zoo, Stylefile, DVG etc.

I'm not sure the book is already available (i think it will only be released in late November). Tristan if you read this, you certainly can tell us.

Last edited by eko on October 23rd, 2005, 5:50 pm, edited 3 times in total.

About the design: actually it makes me happy it is not another attempt to make "another wild graffiti-book" and it works best to contrast the images with sober design. Maybe it's a bit too sober, but for me it looks good on the pictures...but screw the design...IT"S ALL ABOUT CONTENT it's awesome that apparently there is a lot of text in it. i hope it will be more than just brief descriptions...and yes Caleb sure knows how to write layered texts...great thta it seems like a good insight in a world that is quite unknown to a lot of us apart from the internet and some magazines (12oz, Latex, Fiz and a good review in Lodown#45) and a good price! that's not even a proper color-piece in Montana's In other words...I AM VERY CURIOUS!

I agree, of course, that Caleb's stories and other texts (we wrote the main texts together) are what make this book interesting. Today with graffiti pictures so easily available on the internet its important to give context to something like this. The graffiti scene in Brazil is so big - we wanted to show something of all types - good, bad and amazing. So this made it a hard job to include a range of different styles and still keep it interesting.

Ignacio from Lost Art was the key to making this book authentic, his knowledge of the scene particulary in Sao Paulo, his fantastic photography and hard work also make the book worthwhile. Without him I would not have even started. Ignacio sent me a copy of Fiz (Os Gemeos's graffiti magazine) back in 1999 - ever since then I always wanted to know why there was so much talent coming out of Brazil. I was lucky enough to find out. Since we finished the picture content of the book in January - the scene continues to grow and get better - It isn't over yet!

Got my copy this morning and it is fresh. Love the styles so much. I spent 2 weeks in Rio this summer and would have really liked to see more Rio stuff on the book, but those Sao Paulo handstyles are so much nicer than Rio styles. Just posted this on hurtyoubad.com and I stole your picture eko, sorry!